8 ms·
Why didn't they just build a bogey binary and seed that to the torrent sites? I've wondered why copyright holders don't do this more in general. I've seen a fe
by rusk 9y ago
Why didn't they just build a bogey binary and seed that to the torrent sites?
I've wondered why copyright holders don't do this more in general. I've seen a few cases where a downloaded movie for example just gets borked towards the end ... presumed it was deliberate and surely some form of a deterrent!
- rando444 9y agoIf you read the article, they were attempting to target a specific person they believed was cracking their software, not the pirates themselves.
- guy98238710 9y agoThat's doubly stupid. Every capable hacker is going to run the software in a VM or on a separate computer.
- iancarroll 9y agoIn fairness, there are an incredible amount of incompetent “hackers”.
- malnourish 9y agoI would like to see the incompetent hackers who can reverse engineer and break non-trivial copy protection. I'm sure they exist, but I would imagine there's not an "incredible" amount meeting said criteria.
- brazzledazzle 9y agoAlso to be fair those are more often than not just someone using exploits someone much more capable found. Also to be fair, even if the cracker wasn’t paranoid I expect doing it in a VM is much more convenient since you can trivially reset your environment.
- stingraycharles 9y agoThey would only have to make one mistake and would be exposed. You would be surprised how often that happens.
- p49k 9y agoReminds me of a great episode of Reply All: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/21-hack-the-police https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/21-hack-the-police
- Mashimo 9y agoBut it looks like it worked. They got the logins for some other websites they did not had access to before. Logged in and found out how they could generate the keys. At least that was my understanding.
- robterrell 9y agoWhen my shareware was pirated and posted on torrent sites, but had a fairly low number of seeds, I forked transmission and changed the source to give out bad checksums, so that downloaders would never see their downloads complete. I figured I would run this on a bunch of computers and become the top seeds and peers and ensure that few downloads ever finished. It did not take long for me to realize how crazy I was being over this. My time was better spent improving the software and focusing on customers who would pay.
- throwawaysecops 9y agoWe manifest what we see in ourselves.
- endless1234 9y agoYou might even have caused lost sales, depending on your software's business model.